Jackson Bensen (TFD)
Jackson Bensen is the protagonist and a survivor of the outbreak in BrambCrackers' The Frozen Dead. He is the father of Mitchell and Brunswick Bensen. He worked at Arctic Research Station Alpha studying Alaskan weather and conditions at the start of the outbreak before being relocated to Juneau, Alaska with his colleagues. Pre-Apocalypse Before the apocalypse, Jackson married and had two children; Mitchell and Brunswick Bensen. Four years before the outbreak began, he and his wife divorced, his wife taking custody of both children, causing his relationship with them to deteriorate and making him feel that he wasn’t a good enough father. A month or so before the outbreak began, Jackson was stationed at Arctic Research Station Alpha in a remote area of Alaska. In the few days leading up to the apocalypse, his wife decided to send Mitch and Brun to the research base to visit their father. Post-Apocalypse Season 1 "Pilot" After studying a sample of snow with Freida Marques and finding a parasite, he talks to his children, Mitchell and Brunswick, and then to Freida, Edgar Anderson, Hugo Schultz, and Meredith Bryan about recent power outages. He decides to wait for word from command when Freida mentions a coming storm. When Mitch and Brun find a hiker outside, Jackson watches with the other scientist as station medic Stewart Parker and his assistant Charles Patel treat the hiker, whose name is Nathan, and find a human bite mark. When Nathan wakes up, he reveals a dead man bit him. Jackson later asks his sons if there’s anything he can do to make their stay with him more fun. Mitch wants some internet connection and Brun wants to play games. Unsure how to please them both, he gives them a book. Jackson volunteers to head out with Julia Wentz and Edgar by snowmobile to see if they can find the man who attacked Nathan. They find the man and are shocked to see he is indeed dead. They take him back to Alpha Station and into a quarantine room, and later he and the rest of the base go to sleep for the night. "Pulse" Jackson is woken up by Parker’s screaming after the man is attacked and bitten by a now-dead and reanimated Nathan. He works with Spencer Crawford, Julia, and Edgar to pry Nathan off of Parker and tie him to a bed. Jackson then ushers Mitch and Brun out of the room, not wanting them to see this, but Mitch convinces his father to let him stay, while Brun is still forced to leave. Jackson gags Nathan for Parker, who has been patched up by his assistant, and Parker determines that Nathan is truly dead and has no pulse. Parker then connects the undead man they have in quarantine to Nathan, and throws around the possibility that Nathan’s bite could have caused his reanimation. After the group separates, Jackson talks with Julia, Edgar, and Freida about the disease. Julia says she managed to isolate an odd virus from the blood, and she packages it and sends it to the mainland for them to test it formally. They get response an hour later via text message, which reads only one word: “Wildfire.” The scientists discuss this but aren’t able to come to a consensus on what it means. Later, when Jackson can’t find Mitch and Brun in their room, he goes looking for them, and he comes across the undead man that bit Nathan, him having escaped his quarantine, and immediately runs into the control room and puts the base into lockdown, which closes and locks all the doors in the facility. He gets Julia to help him find his children. Jackson returns to the control room with Julia and they look through the cameras on the base to find Mitch and Brun trapped in the recreational room with the undead man. He gets on the intercom and tells them there’s a hallway to their left that didn’t close as part of the lockdown. He watches as Mitch and Brun try to sneak past the undead man, but they’re noticed and chased down the hallway, where they come across a dead end. Frantic, Jackson looks through the other cameras and finds Hugo nearby. He comes in through the intercom and tells him to go to the doorway, because it can only be opened from one side; his. He watches as Hugo gets there just as the undead man reaches the kids, and he enters the code just in time to open the door. The kids get through, but Hugo is grabbed and pulled down, killed by the man. Jackson yells at the kids to run, and Mitch closes the door before following Brun, trapping Hugo and the infected in there. "Finders Keepers" Jackson manages to lift the lockdown, though he keeps the doors locked in the room that the undead man and Hugo are in. He reunites with his children and calls everyone in the base to the cafeteria to discuss everything that just happened. Freida wants to call in an evacuation, ut Jackson suggests they don’t overreact, but Freida assures him she isn’t. Regarding Hugo’s corpse, they decide to leave it there, not being able to do much of anything else. Jackson talks with Mitch and Brun about how they’re doing after their encounter. Brun seems scared out of his mind, and Mitch exclaims that he left Hugo to die by closing the door when they left. Jackson comforts both his children, and assures Mitch that he did what he had to do. The next morning, Jackson’s blood, as well as everyone else’s in the base, is taken by Julia and Charlie and they determine they all have the disease, although it doesn’t mean they will all immediately reanimate. Julia says the bites kill only because of all the bacteria in the infected’s mouth, and Jackson wonders why antibiotics don’t work, to which Julia responds that she doesn’t know. Jackson asks Julia to keep an eye on Mitch, worried about how badly he’s taking leaving Hugo behind in the recreational room. Julia suggests he just talk to him about it, but Jackson says he doesn’t know how, having not been there for him for nearly half a decade. Julia tells him about a child she had that she put up for adoption, and how it is one of the biggest regrets of her life, and she tells him now to throw away his chance to be a parent like she did. Jackson tells her he’ll do what he can. He later spots Mitch, and tries to approach him, but at the last minute he calls it off, realizing he’s not ready to talk to his son yet. As he walks away, he runs into Brun, who is much more open to his father. Brun complains that it’s cold in his room, so Jackson checks out the thermostat to find that the temperature is set to something much higher than what’s coming out of the vents. He and Edgar shut off the heaters from the control room so they stop spitting out cold air, hoping the thermal protection around the base can keep the heat already there inside, and Edgar confirms the heaters are beginning to fail when they investigate them up close, and the two start working to fix them. Later, the two give up, Edgar explaining there’s nothing they can do for the heaters. They head to the cafeteria, where everyone is gathered with blankets because of how cold it’s gotten inside, and huddle together. When twilight comes, it’s freezing cold. They hear choppers outside, and Jackson gets up, barely able to walk from being stiff from the cold, and he looks outside to see the coast guard approaching on choppers. Jackson and the others are put into the choppers and given thermal protective blankets to keep warm. Once Jackson is seated, one of the soldiers says to him that he’s safe now. He leans back and closes his eyes, seeming to believe it. "Do No Harm" Upon arriving at Juneau, Alaska, Jackson and the rest of the group are escorted to the command post, where they’re greeted by Thomas Gates, who welcomes them to Safe-Zone Juneau. He sees the undead from the base being escorted away and asks where they’re going, to which Gates says to be studied. Gates informs them that they can’t leave, as it’s the military’s responsibility to keep them safe. Jackson is given a house with his sons, and before leaving he asks what other rules there are, to which Gates only says that the first one is “do no harm.” At their house, Jackson is concerned when Mitch isolates himself in a room. When Brun asks how long until they can go home, Jackson says that he doesn’t know. Jackson later meets up with the rest of his group outside in the streets, where they discuss leaving, and how the military doesn’t want them to. They aren’t happy with the answers they’ve been given thus far. When Edgar says there’d be no way to get home even if they did escape, Jackson suggests cars, to which Edgar says they might break down on the long trek they must take to get home. After the group separates, Jackson returns home to find Mitch missing from his room. When Brun says he went out to explore, Jackson goes looking for him, finding him with a soldier just a little older than him named Cole Lance. Jackson tries to get him to leave the soldier alone, worried he’s bothering him, but Cole says he isn’t on duty at the moment. When Mitch asks what harm there is in exploring the place, Jackson can’t think of any, so he lets his son go, but tells him he needs to be back home before sunset. "The Devil You Know" Jackson will appear in this episode. Killed Victims *Hugo Schultz (Indirectly Caused) Appearances Season 1 *"Pilot" *"Pulse" *"Finders Keepers" *"Do No Harm" *"The Devil You Know" Category:The Frozen Dead Category:BrambCrackers